Where To Sell A Website for Profit? Make No Mistakes!

Updated on October 3, 2013

Selling your website?

What Are The Choices?

If you are looking to sell your website and are searching for the right place to do it, to be completely frank, you are short of choices. More so if you are doing it yourself without the aid of a broker or the likes.

If you type in the key words "sell website" or "where to sell website" on Google, you'll actually get a useless (mostly outdated) list of places where you can (actually cannot) sell your website. From this useless list, only a few are decent choices, while the rest can completely be ignored. Articles that claimed to give you a "list" of places to sell your website usually were just not being frank. Most of the time they just quickly compiled a list of useless websites and snuck in their own website in the list in the hope that people won't realize their sneaky tactic.

If you are not approaching a website broker (which has its own advantages and disadvantages of doing so, but that's a whole new topic to be discussed and I'm not going to do it here right now, maybe some other time), your real decent choices to go at it alone is to go to webmaster forums, approach potential buyers directly, and of course, lo and behold....Flippa.com, the self acclaimed number one marketplace for buying and selling websites.

Domain name market is much healthier than website market in general.

Unlike Domain Name Marketplace

It's probably true that Flippa.com is currently the number one marketplace for buying and selling websites, given how dire and desperate the choices are, unlike domain name marketplace where the competition is very much alive and healthy. There are numerous of real good marketplace for domain names auctions out there, most are run by established companies rather than individuals, namely Sedo (sedo.com and sedo.co.uk), NameDrive (namedrive.com), Afternic (afternic.com), just to name a few. Plus, domain registrars like GoDaddy (godaddy.com) and Namecheap (namecheap.com) sometimes have their own marketplace where people can easily auction their domains. Plus, there are companies providing a service to allow customers to snatch expiring domains by doing a backorder on desired domains.

This is unlike websites market. When you have little choices of decent marketplace, the market altogether becomes a snooze and lazy (and monopoly follows, but I'll save that topic for later, if I ever have the time to write it).

DigitalPoint forum marketplace.

Narrowing Down The Choices

With the little choices we have, let's narrow them down only to the decent ones. Please note that when we say 'website' here it means we're referring to either established website with earnings and traffics, OR ready-to-go newly built website a.k.a turnkey website, NOT build-on-demand website. So a so-called marketplace for build-on-demand websites will be ignored.

The reason other webmaster forums are not in the list is because even though you have lots of webmaster forums out there with their own Buy/Sell/Trade section where you can sell your website, none is concentrated, efficient, or large/active enough to make it to the list. As for other 'marketplace' website out there, I'm sorry to say. most of them are just "clones" of Flippa with much less traffics (means your potential buyers!) and much less active.

Even Ebay almost didn't make it to the list because of the number of build-on-demand websites being listed there. Actually, it's there in the list just so that there's number 3. So actually the real decent (really, just limited) choices are #1 and #2.

Neck and Neck: Flippa vs The New Digitalpoint Marketplace!

So with the two final choices that we have, let's compare them side by side and decide! Keep in mind that we are comparing the all-new and improved Digitalpoint marketplace rather than the old typical Digitalpoint forum thread sale. So brace yourself, here it is!

Flippa

PROS

The option to choose between private sale or public auction.

The ability to choose your listing to be confidential (your website URL will only be disclosed to people who sign an NDA agreement).

Websites usually go at higher prices than on Digitalpoint marketplace (well, IF your website is sold at all).

There's a bidder verification for those intend to bid higher than $200, discouraging joybidders, which is a big plus.

There's a system to detect shill-bidding to ensure all bids are genuine (arguable).

CONS

Over the top fees that is only best described as highway robbery.

Your auction/listing could be buried by lots of other listings, getting only a few views if you don't use upgrades (which means more fees), which really sucks.

Lots of late bidders a.k.a auction snipers who will only bid in the last hour of auction, hence wasting your time (and testing your patience) especially if you're looking for a quick sale.

If your auction/sale ends up with a buyer and the buyer flees without paying, you'll end up with another fee (success fee) that you need to pay regardless. (NOTE: You can inform Flippa of the situation and the fee will be waived, though there are sellers claiming Flippa still demand them the fee even after doing so. If you have experience regarding this, comments are welcomed!)

The new Digitalpoint marketplace

PROS

Zero fees, so you can keep 100% profit from the sale, plus you don't have to worry if your website ends up not selling.

The number of websites being listed per hour isn't as many as on Flippa, giving your listing a considerate amount of time to be seen.

You can bump your listing so that it goes back up in the pile without any fees, which is very convenient.

Late bidders (snipers) are "almost" non-existent.

You can always sell multiple websites (different price each) in a single listing, saving you time and effort.

CONS

There's no verification system for bidders, so joybidding (people randomly bid on an auction with no intention to buy) is a big problem.

Trolls who are interested in your website but have no money, so they try to downgrade your site so that other people won't be interested and they get the site for a cheap price.

Websites tend to be sold at relatively lower price here than on Flippa.

It's true that scammers are everywhere on the Internet, but there are probably more of them on Digitalpoint marketplace than those that exist on Flippa.

There's more, you say? Let us know by dropping a comment below so that we can add it to the list!

Beware of the greedy bastards!

In Conclusion

So there you go, and now you can decide for yourself which place is better for you to sell your website. Oh, one more thing, beware of the greedy bastards. You know, the ones who always have excuses to take your money and leave you high and dry with an unsold website. Beware of them, and always think before you pay someone money. Make sure what you get in return is well worth it. You might not notice them at first, but they're there, masquerading as trusted organizations or individuals. So, always question where your money goes to, and what for.

Have you sold a website before? What do you think of both Flippa and the new Digitalpoint marketplace? Share your experience, leave a comment below!!

Uchiha Madara's New Mask! By now we all already know that the "Uchiha Madara" aka Tobi that used to lead the Akatsuki is actually NOT the real "Uchiha Madara". This is because the real Uchiha Madara...

We all feel like giving up sometimes, at one point or another in our lives. It's tough when life pushes you to the edge and the whole world seems to be going against you. It's harder when you're all alone and there's no...

Comments 6 comments

I never even thought about the option of selling my website. I'm not in the market to do that now, but this was a very informative article!

Ophelie 3 years ago

Nice overview of buying/selling websites. I just wanted to add a correction: on Flippa, if your auction ends and the winning bidder eventually declines the purchase (or disappears), you don't owe a success fee. You do have to let us know that the sale didn't happen, but you never have to pay a success fee for a failed sale.

You might also be interested in our lower-cost listings for brand-new sites: only $9 to list a site that has no revenue or traffic.

My Cook Book 3 years ago from India

Good info, can you please write a hub on making profits from parking domains, i really have no idea what that is. Just wanted to know how to earn money from parking domain.

nufoundglory 3 years ago from Asia Author

@Meguchan

Thanks, and you can always go back to this article when you decide to sell your website one day! ;)

@Ophelie

Thanks for the comment, Ophelie. It's nice to have someone from Flippa coming here and dropped a comment. I know you can inform Flippa if your buyer doesn't pay, but I decided to include #4 because of reported cases by Flippa sellers, where they claimed to have been demanded by Flippa to pay the success fee regardless. To be fair, I've included a short note to Flippa cons #4.

Regarding the $9 listing fee for turnkey websites, I don't think it makes that much difference because the success fee will be 15% of the final sale price, rather than 5% like other listings.

nufoundglory 3 years ago from Asia Author

....And 15% is a huge cut in profit, in my opinion. Let's say someone is selling a website that sells a unique original script that haven't been sold before. The site would've been categorized under turnkey site ($9 listing fee). And because of the nature of the website, it could sell for much more than the average turnkey websites being sold on Flippa. If the site was sold for $1,500, the $150 fee is still a big cut in profit, in my opinion.